Inside NextBase’s 42% Sales Lift From Rewriting Product Copy

A customer buying a dashcam spends weeks researching, weighing footage quality against price, and picturing the one moment they might need to prove they weren’t at fault, rather than browsing on impulse. For Douglas de Santi, Global Head of D2C at NextBase, designing around that patience was the job.

De Santi’s career ran through a bookstore, a fashion chain, and a grocery conglomerate before he landed at a company that makes a single category of product: dash cameras and connected driving safety tech. Each stop taught him a different version of ecommerce, and none of the old playbooks carried over cleanly to a single-product, high-trust category.

A Small Catalog Rewrites the Rulebook

At the bookstore, de Santi managed eight million products, and the job was discoverability: show the right item to the right shopper. Fashion ran on repeat purchase and lifetime value.

NextBase called for a different skill entirely, educating a customer on the value of one well-chosen feature rather than surfacing the right item from a sea of them. “It’s way more about educating the customer on what the benefit of that feature is for that person, for that situation,” de Santi said.

That shift in the underlying job, not just the product, is what shaped everything else his team built.

A Benefit-Led Rewrite Lifted Sales by 42%

The highest-leverage change de Santi made wasn’t a tool. It was a rewrite of the website’s point of view. He pointed to Steve Jobs’s original iPod pitch as the model to follow: “he wasn’t talking about how many gigabytes the product had. The point of view was, what is in there for me?”

Engineers had built NextBase’s original site around specifications and technical detail, so de Santi’s team ran an A/B test that changed nothing but the framing of the product content, same product, same price. Sales rose 42%.

That single shift, not a platform migration or a new CRO vendor, is what moved the needle most, and it cost nothing to build.

A Considered Purchase Needs a Patient Funnel

A dash cam sale sits between a safety decision and an insurance conversation, and de Santi designed for that weight rather than against it. “When you enter our site, you’re not going to see a pop-up offering you a 30% discount straight away,” he said.

Instead, the funnel is built to let the shopper set the pace: “it is way more about guiding the customer… we are there to support them, to make sure they understand the options.” For a product that stays with a customer for years, rushing the decision works against the sale rather than for it.

Context Beats Frequency in Personalization

Before NextBase did any personalization, de Santi built the customer data platform to support it, pulling in website behavior, support interactions, and product usage rather than relying on purchase history alone.

Fashion brands can email weekly because there’s always a new drop; a dash cam brand gets far fewer legitimate reasons to reach out, so each one has to count. A customer who hadn’t activated the proximity feature on their camera might get a single message pointing them to it, timed to where they actually were in using the product.

“We wanted to make sure that we knew everything that we could about that customer… so that when we reach out, it’s based on context, on the right timing, and the right message,” de Santi said.

More Steps, Clearer Choices, Higher Conversion

Two pieces of CRO orthodoxy don’t survive contact with de Santi’s data. The industry assumption that fewer clicks always wins broke when NextBase split a single, crowded accessories page into several simpler steps and saw conversion rise.

“It’s about making the choices simple for the customer,” he said, pointing to how an ATM works: one clear decision at a time, regardless of how many steps it takes.

The assumption that long product pages hurt conversion broke the same way. NextBase measured engagement on long pages with heat maps and scroll maps, modeled on how Apple builds its own product pages, and found that length wasn’t the problem. Attention was the real variable, and his team could design for it directly.

Reliability Is the Only Thing a Dashcam Buyer Fears

Reliability is the single word de Santi uses for what a dashcam shopper fears before hitting buy. The footage only matters the day something goes wrong, and by then there’s no second chance to capture it.

That fear shapes everything else, from the star ratings de Santi trusts only when collected by a verified third party, to the fast, free shipping he now treats as a baseline Amazon set for the entire category.

Fix the Leaks Before You Optimize

De Santi’s closing advice has nothing to do with budget. Before adding recommendations or new features, find where the site is losing people who were already convinced to buy. “If you have a super sports car driving on a road full of potholes, it’s not going to perform,” he said.

He points teams to their add-to-cart rate rather than their conversion rate as the real measure of potential. A one percent conversion rate alongside a five percent add-to-cart rate means four out of five already-convinced buyers dropped off somewhere in the process, and that drop-off is where the revenue sits.